Month: January 2024 Page 1 of 2

OK, so diet progress, so far so good. kinda.

I’ve not followed and proper kind of diet plan. It’s hard to do with a family, as they all have different needs. I’ve kind of just made it up as I go along. I read a thing about soup being a good idea, so I’ve got the old pressure cooker out and have been making a bowl of soup per day. It seems to work out for that to be lunch. For the rest of it, on the first day I went out for breakfast with Mrs Rad and just had a bowl of fruit, so I’ve been sticking with that. Then a proper meal in the evening, but with yogurt and fruit afterwards.

For drinks, I’ve been having just water, as much as I can. I get offered a few sugary drinks and that has generally been fine.

So how has it been going. Generally fine. I’ve definitely got into a pattern and been mostly sticking to it so I can feel some progress. Until today. Which was a lesson learned. I felt quite hungry in the morning, but then came IKEA.

So we ordered some bits from IKEA that were supposed to go with the bed that we had bought a few weeks back. They had been out of stock so Mrs Rad tried to order them online. And we waited in all day yesterday for them. But did they come? No. Why? That took 3 phone calls to find out, and it seems to be possibly the packaging label was damaged so they didn’t know where to send it.

But all was not lost, I could see online that they might have one of the things in stock at IKEA, so I thought I’d ride the bike over to get it. Well it’s 10 miles each way, not too hard on the electric bike but it was windy. And that probably burnt too many calories. So this evening I just got too hungry and I’ve been eating everything.

So lesson learnt – don’t let yourself get too hungry.

And did they have the thing in IKEA. Of course not.

Dreadfully.

Honestly, it’s been a struggle. I’m definitely massively overweight. It kind of started before lockdown, but got a lot worse during and I haven’t been able to shift it with exercise. I looked particularly large during my Christmas stream. So I decided this year was going to be the year for my diet and it hasn’t worked out at all.

Firstly, January does not seem to be the right month for me. We ended up going out on multiple post Christmas do’s and birthdays, and that meant eating and eating and eating. And I’ve found that once my body is in the mood for eating, I just continue to eat like a horse. Is that a phrase. I’m not sure. Horses do eat though, and they are bigger than me. Maybe a pig.

Anyway, to add injury to insult, we did parkrun on the 30th December and I slipped over in a puddle. I got straight back up and kept running and after a couple of minutes I didn’t feels so bad. However, when I was half way around one of the volunteers asked if I was ok. When I got home I had to do a lot of cleaning of my injust and I’ve got a big wound on my knee. Perhaps moreso was the foot pain too – that went off after a couple of days, but I’ve needed to protect it. So the upshot is that I haven’t been able to do my normal exercise for a couple of weeks.

I’ve gone out on the bike a few times, and we did a slow parkrun each weekend but it’s not the same amount of calorie burn as it would be if I was actually training normally.

So that’s the bad news, but also the good news. Because I was struggling with this it motivated me to try and sort things out. At least from Monday morning this week, so I’ve hopefully come up with a sustainable plan to improve my diet. I’m having fruit in the morning, home-made soup of various kinds at lunchtime and then a proper meal in the evenings. It seems to be going quite well so far, but it’s obviously not been long enough to lose any actual weight, so we’ll see if I can keep it up for a decent length of time.

I also gave up coffee and tea at the end of last year. Which has made the world seem really sad. However that does seem to have sorted my body out a bit too.

So, all is not lost we can be healthy by next Christmas, we are just at the very start and need motivation!

So it’s that time of year again. The second week of January, where some of us spend the week watching people play video games. Awesome Games Done quick is week long charity event on Twitch, where people try to speedrun old games. It can be very entertaining.

So there we were, maybe 10 years ago, at Mrs Rad’s family home, just watching some random stuff on Youtube. Honestly, I can’t really remember what we were watching, but suddenly we were watching youtube videos of speedruns. This seemed ridiculous to me at the time. Who watches someone else play videogames, instead of playing them themselves. However, I particularly remember them speedrunning one of the Zelda titles, I think it was Twilight Princess. I did clock the logo in the corner though Awesome Games Done Quick, and I wondered what it was. Mrs Rad’s brother explained that people donated money as they were speedrunning the games. This seemed even more wild to me. Why would people donate money to someone playing a video game?

However, when I went home, I decided to look this Twitch thing up. I wondered whether there were people who could speedrun my favourite game – Legend of Zelda – Ocarina of time. Sure enough there were a few.

At this point we had very young children, one was 3 the other was 1. And they really struggled to sleep. They liked to have us in the room, to keep them safe. So every evening I would sit there for an hour or two in the dark, trying to help them sleep.

So one night I got my phone out and found Twitch again. I would sit there watching people doing run after run, just as a bit of eye candy whilst I sat there. I didn’t really understand the chat thing, that seemed super scary to me, how could I write something in that? So I didn’t. In fact, for 3 years I didn’t have an account.

But gradually I got to understand the thing. I got to know some of the speed runners and I had some favourites that I liked and I would often come back to watch them every night. I saw that it was more about the community than just being like a TV programme to watch. And I saw why people paid money, even though I didn’t myself.

I never really thought much about streaming myself, until I started to branch out to watch some different speedruns. And once the kids were old enough to not need their hands held every night – I decided to give it a try myself.

My son decided that for his birthday, he wanted a Red Velvet cake. I don’t know if you know what that is, but a red velvet cake is a chocolate cake, but red in colour. But it’s not red in colour because of some mysterious ingredient, it’s red because you add so much red colouring that it overpowers the natural dark brown of the chocolate.

It does however, have some different ingredients. First – buttermilk. So I had to find this in the supermarket, but where, would it be buy the butter, or would it be by the milk. At first I thought butter, but obviously it was milk. And it turns out it’s not a particularly weird product, it was just in a bottle next to the other milks – and quite cheap. It turns out to be sort of a richer version of milk.

I also needed to find the red dye. But it can’t just be any red dye, it had to be red gel. Apparently, if I just use normal liquid food colouring then it will make the red cake green. The first supermarket I went in had every colour of gel except for red. I grabbed purple just in case but I ended up cycling over town late an night in the cold to grab the red gel from the other supermarket.

Which brings me to the other part of this. I ended up making this cake in the middle of the night and it took a couple of hours, I was exhausted. The recipes for red velvet cake on the internet were variable, lots of them had 1 start reviews, and more had four star averages but I could only find 1 star reviews. I finally settled on one of the 4 star reviews, where the one star seemed to say that there wasn’t enough chocolate in it. That seemed to be in the recipe so I was good to go.

The biggest problem was that it said it would cook in half an hour, but the mixture was barely done by the point, so I added another 15 minutes, and then another 5 – and finally it was complete.

Actually it turned out to be delicious. Mrs Rad iced it this morning and we just scoffed it down now.

This is not a how-to guide, but one of the things I’ve enjoyed about the streaming experience is to be able to write a few songs.

I don’t really have any formal training in how to write a song, but I was quite musical as a child. I sang in a choir for quite a long time, and I played recorder and drums, and had some piano lessons. But I wasn’t really any good at anything.

Thanks to streaming, and weirdly the DMCA music thing that happened a few years back, I decided to pick the piano up again. I’d tried a few times over the years but I never really got anywhere. But finally, I managed to get to a position where I could make 4 chords sound kind of ok. If you do want a tip, there’s plenty of Youtube videos that kind of teach this method, although its one of those things that suddenly ‘clicks’ in you mind that gets you going.

I still can’t really play tunes, but instead I sing them, which kinda works for me, and that quickly brought me on to wondering whether I could write my own songs. This time, I didn’t use Youtube much, I just kind of went for it, using some classic chord sequences and a lot of online thesaurus and rhyming apps. I did google ‘how to compose a song’ but there’s loads I don’t understand there and it worries me. So I’m ignoring it.

What is great though is to have the outlet through the stream where I can try out this stuff with friends, but maybe without too much risk. I’ve really appreciated that, and I love that I’m able to at least add something.

One thing that does seem to be needed with song writing is a bit of inspiration. And the stream has given me that. I wrote one song for the sky anniversary, another for the ‘your favourite sky creature challenge’, but I think the most special was the one I got to write after my character from Sandrock had a torrid love affair with Pen – an NPC. It’s called Everything Wrong.

Well, I fell over when I was doing parkrun a couple of weeks back, so I’ve been laying off the running for a bit, to help me heal. Which means I’m back into the cycling. So today I picked possibly the coldest day of the winter to do a long bike ride. It’s not really the fact that it is zero degrees but also that it is humid and there was quite a wind.

However, the electric bike does a good job of dealing with some of that. It’s great fun to ride and I can get quite far without feeling I’ve put too much effort in. If people could feel what I feel when I ride, they would be so much more popular. I’m also glad that the battery seems to work ok in the cold. I did at least 15 miles and used 60% of the battery, so not great, but ok.

Also there’s a few things that I wanted to try out. I bought an attachment arm for the gopro, so that maybe you would be able to see my face when I am riding the bike. It kinda works, but the audio is bad, so I think it’s just for a quick look really. There’s some nice footage though.

The other thing was that there has been a problem with the handlebars a bit, and I was able to take them apart a bit today to diagnose the problem. Now I know what it is I can fix it. Basically, one of the bits that is supposed to have ridges has gone smooth so needs replacing. Its cheap so thats good.

Hopefully we will be back to some bike streams soon

The winter here has been mild so far, some nice warm days, some rainy days. But today it suddenly turned a lot colder. I wore 2 hoodies beneath my coat and it was still cold. They said it would snow (yay) but it didn’t really (boo).

And it was in that context that my ipad decided to break. It was crashing with a purple stream. Initially just a couple of times a day, but by yesterday I couldn’t even type my passcode without it breaking.

So I trundled along to the Apple Store to see what was up. Of course, it seemed to work absolutely fine while I was in there. No sign of a problem, which kinda turned out to be a good thing. Maybe – I’m still not sure if it was a scam.

They said that there was no real way to fix ipads, so the best might be to get a refurbished unit or something. However, they said the best bet might be for me to trade in the existing model and get a new one, and that would probably work out cheaper. Fortunately, they had found nothing wrong with the existing model so this seemed like an opportunity.

And then it went a bit weird. He got the kit so he could start doing the photos for the trade in. I took the screen protector off and he said on the very bottom of the screen their might be a light scratch, and that he would go and get a screen cleaning kit, to get rid of it.

And then nothing. For a long time. I just sat there. I started looking around eventually and a manger type finally came up to me and said that they guy who had dealt with me had been coughing and introduced me to a different guy that was going to help.

Now I’m not saying that this was suspicious, but the new guy was very much ‘I’m here to help you with your trade in’ and didn’t mention the broken ipad at all. So I don’t know if there was some shenanigans going on. Anyway, hopefully the guy recovered from his coughing fit.

It was all plain sailing from there. Except it wasn’t. having taken all the photos of my old ipad and had them AI’d – the system decided that it was in very poor condition and offered me £0 for trade in. Fortunately the guy decided that this was a mistake and went through it again.

And so, a lot of money down the drain (I will spare you the details), and I now have a new working ipad. Very similar to the old one. Almost not different. Apparently its a bit faster.

Happy days.

Woah! I’m exhausted. Been super busy in the house all day.

First thing this morning I got up and realised I had to take the Christmas Tree down. We usually take it down on the 6th January, but we were out last night until late, so I just fell asleep when I got back home. So this morning it was still up. Apparently that’s unlucky, so Mrs Rad had unplugged the lights so that it wasn’t too unlucky.

Anyway, an hours hard work and I had got the Christmas decorations down before Mrs Rad awoke – Hurrah. The next thing is that there is a ring at the doorbell and the delivery from our Ikea visit on Thursday arrived. To be honest, I’d totally forgotten what we had bought, so it was like a second Christmas going through all the things this morning.

We immediately got on with sorting out the shelving – discovering that our sitting room has a tilt of 2 degrees near to the wall! So we had to set the height adjusters on things to some pretty crazy angles. Then we spent some times building all the drawer inserts and it was done. It looks a whole lot better than before.

We nipped to a little independent pizza place for a quick lunch and also stocked up on chocolate and then we got back to work.

We have bought the eldest Radling a loft bed. It’s kind of like a bunk bed but with only the top bunk. The Internet said it would take 4 hours to build it, so we knew we were in for a long slog. There were many many bolts to put in and the instructions were somewhat unclear. The allen keys also had a habit on pinging away when we were trying to build, which was not ideal. Finally we had it done. I think we made it in 3 and a half hours to be fair. The kids are really pleased and spent some time ‘having a go’.

We still had a few more little things to build in the living room, so we went back and did that, but I think we are finally done with the building.

It’s still not tidy. I don’t know if it will ever be. Watch this space to find out.

So we all know all the tropes. You always end up spending more than you thought you would, you always buy things that you don’t need, it’s really boring. I’m here to tell you, all these things about Ikea are true.

Mrs Rad got up early for work this morning, so we met her in town after she finished, so we ended up on the 10am train to Ikea which is like an hour away from here. And we went round all the fake rooms and took photos of ourselves. There’s a photo of the Radlings pretending to work in a coffee shop, and another of them having a business meeting.

I always want all the things they don’t sell. I totally want a fake window for my kitchen and some fake stairs for the living room. And a fake garden area.

Anyway with all this excitement we decided to get lunch, and stand in a 20 minute queue for meatballs – I had the fish instead though, plus a salad to ‘make it healthy’.

The best way to do ikea is to make a list of what you want beforehand and stick to that. However, in the history of time, nobody has ever done that. Instead we turned up with a vague idea of the things that we wanted, and randomly collected them. And then you ge to the kitchen section, where suddenly the need to replace every kitchen item is overwhelming.

And then we wondered whether we could carry everything we had bought, but decided that we couldn’t, so we decided we would pay for a delivery. And then so we went back and got a load of heavy stuff that we had ‘missed’.

And that’s how you spend £800 on nothing that you need.

Well we have bought a load of storage for the kitchen and replaced the kids beds + the obligatory kitchen stuff.

So that was my day. Exhausting.

From the excitement of the new year, looking forward to the great things that will happen, today brought us the colour grey. It has rained all day. Non Stop. The clouds only making the day slightly lighter than the night. I went out twice today and go wet feet both times. My shoes and socks have spent longer on the drying rack than on my feet.

And yet, today has been quite a good day. I got to get back to streaming after the Christmas break and spend some time with my friends. It’s nice to have the chance to speak to different people in different countries and generally just chill out and have fun.

I’ve been trying to think up fresh ideas fore the new year, such as my brilliant plan for a streamer exchange programme. The plan is the on April 1st, all the Sky Streamers will swap with a game of the opposite genre (e.g. Fortnite), kind of for fun, but maybe so we all learn something.

I’ve also set my follower goal for 2024 – I think 2024 followers may be possible up from the 1641 I have today, which is apparently down from the 1644 I had this morning. hmmmmmmm.